How To Use Facebook Analytics Tool to Grow Your Business

Facebook quietly rolled out its new Analytics tool in May. Most brands don’t even know it exists yet!

It’s a powerful platform (with a mobile app version) that rivals Google Analytics and helps advertisers understand the entire journey of a user they’re targeting across the suite of Facebook channels, including desktop, messenger, and more.

While Facebook Analytics is enormously valuable, it can be a challenge to set up and understand.

So we’ve broken it down in this guide to mastering Facebook Analytics!

If you’re new to Facebook advertising, you might think that posting a few fun and well designed sponsored posts will help your brand gain recognition and followers.

While it’s really important to add likes (and have fun while doing it!), if you publish your ads without a plan (i.e., a campaign with clear objectives, like driving website traffic or creating conversions), you’re missing out!

Framing your Facebook advertisements with one or more goals for your business or organization will help you make the most of the process — from crafting ads that are more targeted to your specific audience(s) to make sure you are keeping up to speed with the results.

In particular, analyzing your ads after they’ve run for a period of time will go a long way towards helping you increase your ROI.

While many advertisers have been toggling through various tools like Google Analytics and relying on a Facebook Ads Manager to understand better their traffic breakdown, the recent release of Facebook Analytics has all of the marketers talking.

It is a powerful addition to the platform that allows advertisers to understand their viewers at a granular level.

Facebook Analytics (Part 1) – Setup

One of the fundamentals of Facebook advertising is to be able to measure the results and make decisions based off of that data.

Without being able to track all outcomes we have to resort to guesswork, resulting in a lot of wasted ad spend.

Have you ever found Facebook Ads Manager and Google Analytics frustrating as they only provide different pieces of the puzzle but don’t reveal the full picture?

However, it’s still limited as it only looks at actions once an ad has been clicked or viewed, it doesn’t take into account any organic interactions on the Facebook business page.

It also doesn’t look at the overall history of each user; instead, it uses “last touch attribution” where it measures only the outcomes of the last ad that was clicked or viewed.

Marketers have often turned to Google Analytics instead to map out the user journey, but this also has limitations as it doesn’t interact with the Facebook pixel.

Enter Facebook Analytics.

Facebook Analytics can group together several Facebook pages, pixels and apps to give a complete picture of user interactions over time.

Now, for the first time, we can track the results from organic and paid marketing across multiple devices and sessions in what Facebook calls “people-first analytics for an omnichannel world.”

Best of all it’s completelyfree!!!

Setting Up Facebook Analytics

The hardest part of using Analytics is setting it up, to begin with.

It requires a working knowledge of Business Manager, if you’re not familiar with it, read our guide here.

Within Business Manager navigate to the Measure & Report Menu and select Analytics:

Next, you’ll see a list of your business pages and pixels.

Using just one page or pixel will be of very limited use though, we want to look at the big picture and follow users across all our channels.

Instead, you should set up an Event Source Group – or ESG – by choosing the option in the top right-hand corner:

You’ll now be able to name your ESG and choose the apps, pixels, and pages to be included:

Configure your options and create your ESG:

Although this step looks simple, often the assets you require won’t appear unless you are the account owner of the relevant pages and pixels.

That means agencies and contractors need to take an extra step at this stage.

It’s not enough to have access to the ad account, within Business Manager the pixel is a separate asset, and this has to be shared by the pixel owner.

To share a pixel, the account owner can go to Business Settings within Business Manager and expand out the Data Sources option:

Click on the pixel option, choose the relevant pixel and share with the person that is setting up Analytics:

If the assets you require still don’t appear when creating the ESG check your access level, generally admin level access rather than just analyst level is necessary to set up an ESG.

Once you have created your ESG the hard part is over, and now we can dig into some analytics!

Facebook Analytics (Part 2) – Using Your Dashboard

When we log into Facebook Analytics we’re presented with a dashboard that is automatically generated with the most relevant data including Growth, Engagement, Monetization, People and a sidebar with Daily Insights:

The possibilities are endless, but in this article we’ll look atthree of the most popular reports to create in Analytics, starting with Funnels.

Facebook Analytics Report #1 – Funnels

Funnels allow us to track the user journey from the first touch to completion of our end goal.

Start by selecting Funnels from the lefthand menu, and then you’ll get a screen like this:

Click on the green Create Funnel button to create your first funnel.

In this example we want to see if comments on the Facebook page result in users going to the website and ultimately purchasing so we can set up a simple three-stage funnel:

For this business 36.9% of people that commented on the Facebook page then went on to view the website and 10.5% of these then purchased, meaning 3.9% of people that commented decided to buy from the site.

At last, we can prove the value of engagement on the Facebook page!

Don’t forget to use the pin option in the top righthand corner to pin a report and save it to your chosen dashboard:

Facebook Analytics Report #2 – Revenue

The second report we’ll look at is a revenue report.

This one is simple to set up.

You only need to choose the date range and then click on the Revenue option from the menu:

Scrolling down this report also tells us the number of purchasers and the age and gender breakdown:

Pretty useful, isn’t it?

Facebook Analytics Report #3 – Customer Lifetime Value

The third – and perhapsthe most powerful – report we’ll cover is Customer Lifetime Value.

Again, this is easy to set up.

First, select Lifetime Value from the left-hand menu, then you must decide whether to include All Users (anyone that interacted with you) or Paying Users (only those that made a purchase).

In this example we’ll look at Paying Users:

Conventional reports in Business Manager merely look at the cost per conversion and revenue for each individual purchase. By looking at CLV, instead, we can see how much a customer is worth to us over the course of several months.

For several businesses, we have seen a CLV 50% higher than that of the initial purchase.

This allows us to spend 50% more to acquire each new customer as we know will get extra revenue from these repeat customers, allowing us to scale ad spend and revenue.

Time To Test It Out!

The best part about a new tool like this is the chance to be an early adopter of strategies that others haven’t yet caught on to.

If you use Facebook Analitycs tool right, you could gain a significant advantage over your competitors or other brands, differentiating yourself on the Facebook platform and creating content that your users will love!

Now that you have a clearer understanding of Facebook Analytics, why Facebook rolled it out, the potential value it can provide, and how to get yourself set up, it’s time to test it out!

And don’t forget to let us know how it’s going (the comments below are waiting to be populated). Since Facebook Analytics is such a new tool, it’s important to share your successes or obstacles; maybe AdEspresso or other readers can help answer even more of your questions or provide creative new ways to use to the tool to your advantage.

You’re absolutely right, thanks for your comment!
This was a refresh of a 2017 post, but since the introduction of Facebook own analytics tool, this article should have another title (which now has).
At the same time, Facebook Analytics tool should have its own blog post, and we published that too.
Take a look at How To Use Facebook Analytics Tool to Grow Your Business and leave us a comment there, we care for your opinion! Cheers, Ciao 🙂

Just heard about the tool in an ad training I listened to that dating back to January. Took a look today and thought whoa! A lot of people really aren’t talking about this, I should learn it now! As you said: be an early adopter. Thank you for the explanation. Looking forward to reading the How To article.

Hi Paul! Thank you for the article! I really enjoyed how clearly you have explained the core of Facebook Analytics, especially how you clarify what are each metrics for and where are they situated!
My colleague Giedre has also published a blog post on 3 Facebook performance metrics that matter the most: https://whatagraph.com/blog/articles/top-5-facebook-performance-metrics-that-actually-matter
Hope this article will be also interesting for you and if you like it, feel free to mention it in your blog posts.
Thank you!

Nice guideline on this blog. I found this much useful information about Facebook analytics. Facebook analytics is a very helpful tool for growing the business. Thanks for such post and please keep it up.

Breakdown the data: You can break the page views metrics down by certain characteristics. For total views, you can break it down by section (of your Facebook Page). For total people who viewed, you can break it down by section, age and gender, country, city, and device. This can help you understand more about the people who are interested in your Page.
Happy New Year!

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